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Over the next couple of years, paying with your phone will become as commonplace as paying with cash, which is why every man, his bank and his phone company are in the battle to win the mobile wallet space. So who’s going to win?

Baby Boomers and Gen-X have in common the need to experience life in all its glory. Whether that is born out of a sense of adventure, the need for tactile feedback or in the sense of face-to-face social connections, at the core of much of our buying behavior historically has been the need to “touch and feel” a product before a purchase. There’s a subtle shift in this behavior with Gen-Y and Gen-Z/Digital Natives (sometimes collectively called Generation-M or, as Time Magazine called them, the ‘multi-tasking’ generation) that is critical to understand if you are going to engage this community successfully moving forward, and it emphasizes why the physical store is under increased threat.

With 1.32 billion daily active users, Facebook is widely considered the most used social media platform. 79% of Americans use Facebook—the platform with the second closest usage percentage is Instagram, at 32%. Globally the number of smartphone users is expected to reach 2.5 billion in 2019 with 36 percent global penetration, but more significantly with most developed economies expecting 70-80 percent smartphone penetration within a couple of years. This has led to massive increases in social media use over mobile. WeChat, the Social Mobile Network powered by TenCent in China, had 963 million monthly active users in 2017.Over 3.5 billion snaps are sent everyday on Snapchat as of the third quarter of 2017.

Banking is changing forever. Organizations like Britannica, Blockbuster, Borders, and even Bank of America (hint: don’t start a business with ‘B’) all suffered from the same collective challenge. When your business is built around a specific distribution model, how can you adapt when that distribution model is no longer relevant?

It’s hard for many to conceive of a world without little bits of paper that we today denote as currency. In fact, money is so ingrained in society that we’ve come up with hundreds of slang terms around the world to describe the stuff. In the US you might hear the term “Benjamins”, “Dead Presidents” or “Greenbacks”. Can you guess which countries gave birth to “Bucks”, “Clams”, “Loon”, “Dough”, “Shtuka”, “Two Bob” and “Moola” when it comes to describing money?

Since 2005 I’ve been predicting the fundamental decline of branch banking. For almost 10 years I fought bankers who decried my assessment that branches would cease to be the most important channel in banking, to be replaced by far more efficient mechanisms for revenue generation and relationship. Today the discussion is increasingly resorting to a sort of desperate plea — “but branches aren’t going to die completely, are they?” No one who is watching these trends today is still saying branches will grow.

Today’s business world is significantly different from that of just a few years ago, and the velocity and magnitude of change and uncertainty will only accelerate. We are operating in an environment of high “VUCA” – volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.

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BBN Times connects decision makers to you. Experts in their fields, worth listening to, are the ones who write our articles. We believe these are the real commentators of the future. We quickly and accurately deliver serious information around the world. BBN Times provides its readers human expertise to find trusted answers by providing a platform and a voice to anyone willing to know more about the latest trends. Stay tuned, the revolution has begun.